


Rivers and Roads

by thelittlegreennotebook



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: F/F, F/M, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-27
Updated: 2015-05-27
Packaged: 2018-04-01 14:44:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4023817
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thelittlegreennotebook/pseuds/thelittlegreennotebook
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She makes a habit of kissing the scar from the bullet the Count lodged in his bicep because of course she does.</p>
<p>(Or five times Oliver tells Felicity about his scars and one time she tells him about hers.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rivers and Roads

**Author's Note:**

> This could possibly be the last thing I post before I go off into the land of no wi-fi for two months, but I sincerely hope it's not. Writer's block is being a fickle frenemy these days. Title from the Head and the Heart song by the same name.

They’re in Texas by the time the wound on his hand has healed, the raw, silvery-pink skin stretched tight to span the gap cleaved by his clutch on Ra’s al Ghul’s sword.

“I still don’t get it,” Felicity says, turning over his left hand in her right and glancing down at the remnant scar of the wound that she had carefully bandaged for weeks. The wind whips a lock of hair loose from her ponytail, and she absently tucks it behind her ear before settling her free hand back over the top of the steering wheel. “I used to flinch away from dodge balls in gym class — you know, the soft foam ones that are practically pillows? — and you _grabbed_ a _sword_.”

She retracts her hand from his to shift gears as she decelerates, and the road takes them winding through a tiny town, one of countless they’ve passed through in the past two weeks. Sometimes they stop, sometimes they don’t. The sun is still peeking up at them in the distance, so this time they don’t.

He offers his hand back to her and she takes it dutifully, sliding her fingers into the spaces between his.

Oliver shrugs and looks at where their hands are intertwined. “There wasn’t much else I could do. I would have died if he had landed that blow, and…”

He trails off, smiling just slightly as he runs his thumb over the smooth skin of her hand.

“And?” she asks steadily, looking over at him curiously as she gently coasts to a halt at an errant stop sign in the heart of the town.

They haven’t talked about his scars much, but this time she just so happens to be elemental to his story. If he has his way, she always will be.

“And I wasn’t fighting to die,” he tells her, bringing their hands up to kiss the knuckle of her thumb. “I was fighting to live.”

x-x-x

Sometimes they fill the miles of road with endless conversation, and sometimes the silence calks the spaces between all of their words, spoken and unspoken. The last few hours have been much of the latter, a comfortable silence in the haze of a hot afternoon, but eventually the rush of wind beating down upon their ears becomes dry and tiresome.

When Oliver spots the beach — just a flurry of color and activity where the sand is crawling with people — he needs only to glance at Felicity before she’s nodding eagerly with approval.

Often they are content to wrap themselves in an intimate silence; other times, the company of the outside world seems an exquisite luxury.

The beach is moderately populated and filled with the happy sounds of careless summer days, the perfect backdrop to the breeze across Oliver’s neck and the armful of warm skin against his.

Felicity had tucked herself right between his legs what seems like hours ago, propping a book against her knee with one hand and submerging herself entirely into a different universe. Oliver had been happy to loosely bind one arm around her waist and lose himself to sense; the sun washing down over his shoulders, the tickle of her golden, flyaway hair against his chin, the caress of her hand against his thigh, toying with the hem of his board shorts.

He thinks she’s entirely immersed, slightly curved over the rapidly diminishing pages and totally still in her rapt concentration, when her fingers lose their mindless purpose against his skin and inch up the edge of his shorts.

“Felicity,” he warns gently, and then he realizes that her thumb is tracing the razor thin line of an old scar — old and insignificant, really, in the grand scheme of things, but one that has him swallowing nervously with an unexpected rush of emotion.

Felicity tends to do that — unravel all of his feelings until there they are, laid out before her and begging to be explained despite, just two minutes ago, being sealed off with the weight of steel doors.

“Slade,” he tells her softly, and watches as goose bumps gather and spread up her spine in silent acknowledgement. “When he was training me on the island, we had to fashion our own eskrima sticks. The one that did that,” he says, covering her hand and following the pattern of her fingers across the long, thin curve of skin, “was a little bit rough around the edges. We had to dig out a three inch splinter from my leg.”

She sucks in a small breath. “Ouch,” she says, and he tugs her back lightly so that she leans fully against his chest. He can see her face pulled into a small wince, and he feels his chest fill with warmth — a mere splinter is decidedly nothing compared to the suffering he has felt, but his pain is not comparative to her.

“It was more of a test,” he tells her.

“He did it on purpose?”

“I don’t know about that. But he knew about a kind of agony that I didn’t yet. A lot of what we did was just to build up my tolerance. Next to him, I was…weak, and he needed to be a fighter, not a security detail.”

Her hand stops to rest against his knee. “You looked up to him.”

His breath stills in his chest. “Sometimes, I don’t know whether it’s harder to remember him as my friend or the monster I made him into.”

She rests her head against the curve of his shoulder and reaches back to cup his cheek. “You were trying to save his life.”

“I…”

“Can’t change the past,” she finishes for him, because she knows that some days he’s still trying to fight his way to the surface. To absolution. “Or erase the good intentions behind unfortunate consequences. No matter how hard you might try to, Oliver Queen.”

He dips his head to press a kiss to her neck. “Thank you.”

_For being here. For reminding me. For knowing and loving me anyways._

Her hand slides away from his jaw and settles back on his thigh. “Always.”

x-x-x

They’re laying side by side on the hood of the Porsche, her bare feet suspended in mid air while his boots nearly touch the ground.

The Smoky Mountains form a restricting ring around them, but the dark sky is open with a million pinpricks of light reaching down, and the darkness extends eternally in every direction. The space they occupy feels infinite and they, within it, vastly insignificant.

Their hands are tangled together between their hips, the only point of contact between them, and Felicity’s thumb is making lazy paths from his knuckles to the bottom of his hand. There, tucked right into the indent between the fleshy base of his palm and the smooth, delicate skin of his inner wrist, she feels a small patch of raised skin, no bigger than the outer edge of her fingernail.

“Island?” she asks softly into the darkness, and sees the dark shape of his head shake in her periphery.

“I was fourteen,” he answers readily, like he was waiting for her to ask. “Thea woke me up when she had a nightmare, and I wanted to make her hot chocolate, like Raisa always did for me. Except Raisa always used a step stool to reach our top cabinets, and I didn’t want to lose my cool in front of my seven-year-old sister.”

“Did you just use the phrase ‘lose my cool’?” Felicity asks with quiet incredulity. “Out loud? _Lose my_ — I’m not sure you had cool to lose, honestly, if that was your thought pro — ”

He extends his index finger out from their intertwined hands and uses it to poke her repeatedly, just above her hip. Felicity lets out a peal of delighted laughter and closes the distance between them by twisting easily into his side, pressing her lips to the sleeve of his shirt.

“Okay, okay,” she surrenders. “Go on.”

“I couldn’t reach the mugs,” he admits. “But I refused to use the stool. When I jumped high enough to finally get my hand around one, I gripped it so hard it shattered in my hand. There were a lot of cuts, but none of them scarred except that one.”

“What did you do?” she asks into the fabric of his shirt.

“I cleaned up the glass, wrapped my hand in a dish towel, and made her hot chocolate in a normal plastic cup.”

Felicity gasps comically. “All of those melted toxins, though. Poor Thea.”

Oliver smiles into the darkness. “I think she turned out all right.”

“Yeah,” Felicity says, turning back to look up at the stars where they twinkle down with soft light. “Yeah, she did.”

x-x-x

She makes a habit of kissing the scar from the bullet lodged in his bicep because of course she does.

Felicity may not be able to tell you the exact moment she fell in love with Oliver Queen, but she remembers with perfect clarity the chilling fear that accompanied the Count’s fingers on her skin, the terror she felt with those needles pressed against her neck. And, through it all, the concrete knowledge — the _absolute_ certainty — that Oliver wasn’t going to let anything happen to her, even when she had tried to resign herself to a horrible fate for the sake of his crusade — for the sake of everything he had done to honor his best friend’s memory.

“I wasn’t going to lose you,” he tells her one night, when her lips linger on the spot a little longer than usual.

“Thank you,” she whispers reverently into his skin.

His hand ghosts over her hair, and he presses a kiss to the crown of her head. “Always.”

x-x-x

The scar in the near center of his torso terrifies her like nothing else ever has. The tissue, puckered and brighter than the rest of the worn marks that cover his body, encompasses everything about their relationship that used to be broken — the pieces of her shattered heart that she spent months studiously fitting back together, not entirely sure the end result would be worth it.

“Promise me,” she says hoarsely one morning, when they’re pressed together under fresh sheets in a picturesque house on the Cape. “Promise me you won’t ever walk away again. That we’ll face things together. That we’ll find another way.”

He doesn’t tell her about the Eobard Thawne and the promise of fifty-six more years. Felicity is his future and his forever and maybe she deserves to know, but the picture of her waiting for him to die — somewhere down the line when the years tick around to an even eighty-six — makes his heart ache heavily inside his chest.

He guiltily thinks that maybe his insight into the future is the only thing that will make it easier to reassure her — that maybe the only reason he can make this work is because he knows now, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that they will succeed. But then he looks up into her blue eyes and remembers that he doesn’t think anyone, not a single person on earth, could have predicted all the ways that Felicity Smoak would turn his world upside down.

He’s certain about exactly one thing in his life, and it’s her.

So he slowly peels her fingers away from where they rest against his sternum and brings them up to his lips, kissing the pad of each one slowly before placing them back against his heart and looking straight into her eyes.

“We’ll find another way,” he promises her, watching as she exhales deeply and closes her eyes, satisfied with his words and the steady beat of his heart against her palm. “We always do.”

x-x-x

(He tells her about his scars out in the open, casting his secrets into an illuminated universe. She tells him about hers in the darkness, huddled under blankets and hidden in the night.

“I hated him for a long time after he left,” she confesses, her voice a sound with no origin. He hates that he can’t see her, but he doesn’t move. “Sometimes I still feel that way, and I’m scared that hating him for so long makes me some kind of terrible person.”

He reaches out and breathes relief at the fact that he can find her so easily, even surrounded by the smothering blanket of an inky night sky. His hands cups her cheeks and he presses his forehead to hers, breathing out against her lips. He knows all too well that it’s too much to hope for protection from an ugly past. But sometimes, with the right person, the future doesn’t seem nearly so frightening.

“Nothing,” he tells her roughly, “ _nothing_ can make you a terrible person, Felicity.”

And maybe it’s not enough to chase away the darkness, but he’s working on it. He’ll spend the rest of his life working on it, trying to be what she needs. For now, she burrows tightly into his chest and he holds her like that for a long time, curled up against the world.

He can’t protect her from this, but he can ease some of the weight off of her shoulders, like she’s so often done for him. Talking to her, giving pieces of himself to her — it’s easy. Felicity makes it easy. She’s a special sort of freedom, he thinks, bright and irreplaceable. Maybe someday, he’ll find the words to tell her just how good she is.

For now, though, he wraps her tight into his arms, and together, they heal.)


End file.
